Recently, color management for managing displayed colors of printing materials and monitors has been spread widely. The ICC (International Color Consortium) proposed color management using “profile formats for production and interpretation of color data independent from available computer system” (hereinafter, referred to as ICC profiles). ICC profiles are provided for each type of printing paper based on the specified color temperature for each light source (generally, 5,000 K (kelvin)), wherein ICC profiles may specify information concerning settings of color spaces and information concerning conversion between profiles. Various devices such as printers and monitors have their unique ICC profiles, and therefore they may implement operating systems and application programs to set color spaces using ICC profiles so as to share color information among various devices while maintaining tints for images.
Before printing images on printing papers with a printer, the printer may request each user to confirm tints of images to be printed on printing papers (i.e. images on printing materials) with a monitor in advance. A print emulator is known as a tool implementing a method for reproducing tints of images on printing materials with a monitor. Even when the print emulator is used to properly reproduce tints of images on printing materials with a monitor, it is necessary to adjust white points on a monitor to white points on each printing paper.
The white color of printing papers may be affected by both reflection characteristics of printing papers and color-temperature characteristics of light sources emitting ambient light. The most generally-known light sources such as fluorescent lights may suffer from dispersions in color temperatures, and therefore actual color temperatures of light sources may not match color temperatures (e.g. 5,000 K) specified by ICC profiles. For this reason, white points on the same type of printing papers may be varied depending on light sources, and therefore white points on printing papers may not match white points on a monitor specified by ICC profiles. In this case, the print emulator may not function properly.
To properly reproduce tints of images on printing materials with a monitor under the aforementioned circumstances, it is necessary to adjust white points on a monitor specified by ICC profiles to white points on printing papers under an actual light source. For this reason, it is necessary to obtain information concerning the actual color temperature of a light source, and therefore it is necessary to correct ICC profiles by recalculating the color space of a monitor based on the information concerning the color temperature. In this case, for example, it is possible to obtain the information concerning the color temperature of a light source by use of an illumination sensor for adjusting luminance, which is installed in a monitor.